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		<title>Addressing my halves &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2017/07-July/19.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>Addressing my halves</h1>
			<p>Day 00865: Wednesday, 2017 July 19</p>
		</header>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		...
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="mental">
	<h2>Mental health watch</h2>
	<p>
		I woke up three times in the middle of the night, each time feeling like I was a woman.
		I&apos;m not sure what that was about.
		The first time, my testicles felt foreign; not like I wasn&apos;t supposed to have any, but that the ones I had weren&apos;t my usual ones.
		Strange.
		It&apos;s also worth noting that I didn&apos;t feel like I <strong>*wanted*</strong> to be a woman or was <strong>*supposed*</strong> to be one; it felt like I <strong>*was*</strong> one.
		Is that my feminine half feeling less constrained now or something?
	</p>
	<p>
		I still have mixed feelings about being gay.
		I like the hodgepodge in my head, but I don&apos;t think being gay is a requirement for that.
		I mean, I could still have a mix of masculinity and femininity, without my sexuality lying on the opposite side of the line as my sex.
		It&apos;s not that there&apos;s anything wrong with being gay, it just makes finding a partner more difficult.
		That said, perhaps being gay is a good compliment for my hodgepodge.
		I mean, if I was in a heterosexual relationship, it&apos;s likely my partner would be cisgendered, and would therefore expect me to take on the roles that complement their own desired roles.
		Finding a heterosexual, mix-gendered person is probably not an easy task.
		At least with my being gay, I think most potential partners I find will, at the very least, be understanding of my hodgepodge, even if they don&apos;t have one themself (they could be very masculine or very feminine, both options being unlike myself).
	</p>
	<p>
		Lexi (my feminine half) and Xander (my masculine half) seem to speak in perfect unison.
		Most of the time, it&apos;s not even useful to distinguish the two any more.
		However, various thoughts and impulses that I have can be tracked to one of them or the other.
		It seems I can use this as a tool to help me manage my own mind.
		For example, today, Lexi kept getting distracted.
		I forget what she was getting distracted by, but it was pretty obvious that it was her, and not Xander, that was the culprit.
		As I&apos;ve only one mind, this of course kept Xander from focussing on coursework.
		I can bribe them individually though.
		Overall, there&apos;s nothing I really want right now that I can actually have, but Lexi, Lexi wanted this de-tangling brush I saw in the store the other day.
		I told her if she let Xander get his coursework done with time to spare before work, I&apos;d get her that brush.
		It totally worked.
		I&apos;m aware that people reward themselves like this to bribe themselves into doing what they don&apos;t want to do but need done, but I can&apos;t help but feel my situation is strange.
		My whole self bribed half myself to let the other half work.
		Said other half, likewise, didn&apos;t even have a problem getting stuff done to begin with, and didn&apos;t need a bribe.
		(Xander&apos;s the logical and technical one; he enjoys this computer science coursework anyway.)
		My brain is so mixed up, but it&apos;s kind of amusing to find what makes each side tick.
		Actually getting the brush was kind of a weird experience, too.
		The cyan version of the brush was a nicer colour, but I was oddly drawn to the yellow-green one.
		Maybe Lexi and Xander have different colour preferences?
		I&apos;m not even sure what that was about.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I squandered my two days off from work this week, mostly because of the euphoria I was feeling from having finally figured out (for the most part) what I am and finally feeling whole and complete.
		Since then, I&apos;ve been worried I wouldn&apos;t get my coursework in on time.
		Thankfully, I still had time to finish what needed to be finished, though it did take some frantic scrambling, especially to complete my database-related coursework.
	</p>
	<p>
		I finished my discussion assignment for the week:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I don&apos;t understand what you&apos;re saying about collections with nulls.
			Some collections will contain nulls, but do we really need to avoid those collections?
			If those collections didn&apos;t have purpose, they might as well not even be defined.
			Instead, we just need to do proper checking before using the elements.
		</p>
		<blockquote>
<pre><code>if(element == null){
	element.method();// or whatever we need to do with the object
}</code></pre>
		</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			You make a great point that readability and simplicity often outweigh the benefits of efficiency.
			The Java language itself it a good example of this.
			Java&apos;s not the most efficient language, seeing as it isn&apos;t compiled to run on any real machine.
			Instead, it&apos;s compiled to run on a virtual machine that must be emulated on the desired platform.
			Its strength comes not from its efficiency, but the way it makes work easier for programmers.
			Programmers don&apos;t have to write a bunch of platform-specific code, which makes it simpler to code and easier to read.
			In the same way, the specific implementations of different collections can also provide a simplicity and ease in the reading and in the writing of the code.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Your post is simple and to the point.
			For sure, you need to consider the basic structure of the data you need first.
			If what you need is a mapping, a list or set isn&apos;t going to provide what you need.
			The specific implementation (hash map versus tree map) can also play a role in fine-tuning the application to function the way you want it to.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
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